Having now arrived at the last decades of the twentieth century, it is uncontroversial to recognize, in a rapid profile of psychoanalysis, that this discipline, directly or through techniques derived from it, has reached an almost planetary spread. Almost, because there is a notable exception, the world of socialist republics, in which a substantial closure prevails, albeit with notable internal differences: explicit refusal in the USSR, with the alliance between Stalinist Marxism and the Pavlovian tradition; a more nuanced situation in the countries of Eastern Europe, where more recently a somewhat intense revival of interest has become clear.
This diffusion, while certainly enormous, has, however, taken three-quarters of a century to reach its current level. Let us go over its major events. Up until the First World War, psychoanalysis presents itself as an important innovation or oddity ostracized by academic authorities, which has its essential basis in a group of German-speaking Jewish doctors and intellectuals, with significant extensions to some non-Jewish Germanophone centers and to isolated personalities in other countries, in Europe and America. After the First World War, while the ostracism by academia more or less persists, psychoanalysis exits the specialist ambit and consolidates its particular institutions, national and international. With the advent of Nazism, it is expelled from its original centers and finds refuge in the Anglo-Saxon world, where it spreads widely into all cultural spheres. After the Second World War, psychoanalysis, returning to Europe, pervades Western culture and its academic, psychiatric, and psychological institutions to an ever greater degree.
This type of diffusion—wide, but with notable and durable exclusions; slow, but insistent and continuous—allows us perhaps an initial clarification. It is a type of diffusion that recalls the expansion of an ideological movement, or equally of a religion in the traditional sense. It is not the diffusion—possibly delayed, but then rapid and universal—of a strictly scientific discovery. Therefore, in this respect, psychoanalysis is closer to the traditional humanistic disciplines than to, say, molecular biology. The type of science that it claims to constitute thus appears, even from the historical and sociological point of view, different from the natural or biological sciences.
Certainly, the theoretical horizon Freud moved within, especially at the outset of his work, was precisely that of the established sciences of his time, through the encounter with the physicalist physiology of von Helmholtz and Brücke, who, in Freud’s words, “carried more weight with me than anyone else in my whole life.” Yet the working method and the methodology of research which he established rapidly brought him beyond this horizon. Let us turn to certain keystones. Calling on a stranger to express “what occurs in his mind,” his own Einfälle, Freud demonstrated that he could put entirely between parentheses his neurological-psychiatric understanding of this stranger, whoever it be (and among the first it was Freud himself), confident that the truth would be revealed starting from the words of the other. This unprecedented solicitation to expression led to the emergence of a world that, beyond its apparent chaos and the singularity of the individuals in which it emerged, delineated thrusts and tensions discernible in others too. That is, Freud delineated the territory he named the unconscious, and its exploration allowed one to know how profound and complex and active, even at a later stage of life, was the continent of childhood, which is present in each person. While this exploration, though certainly difficult, could appear at the outset to leave undisturbed the position and the identity of the explorer, it was revealed soon afterward to involve him directly, in the first person. Thus, the concept was born of transference (on the part of the person in analysis) and later of countertransference (on the part of the analyst): a pair of concepts that is found at the center of psychoanalytic work and discourse.
The full promotion of the Einfälle, that is to say, the “method of free association”; the revelation through these of the unconscious and the childlike; the elaboration of the analyst-analysand relation as one which overcomes decisively the classic relation of observer-observed: these are some of the fundamental elements of a very distinct experience, in which concordances, replications, and returns emerge and are developed between the often forgotten and distorted past and the present. This is what could be called the solid or weighty nucleus of psychoanalysis, what allowed the Freudian experience to be repeated, confirmed, and contradicted within a specific analytic apparatus or setting that, even in its successive intervening variations, manifests the constancy and uniformity of a specific scientific laboratory. It is within this laboratory that the most significant advances of psychoanalysis have taken place—since it is necessary to contest a common notion that is rather widespread, according to which psychoanalysis begins and ends with Freud. It remains true that, insofar as it is the locus of the emergence and enunciation of the unconscious and the childlike, psychoanalysis is found to uncover recurring or typical elements: hence the impression of boredom associated with these in psychoanalytic case studies. Yet it is also true that this territory, after Freud, has known other descriptions, connected on the one hand to the extension of analysis to situations precluded in Freud’s time (above all, to children, psychotics, and so-called boundary cases) and on the other hand to a deeper attention turned toward the position of the analyst with respect to the person in analysis and to himself. From this work, in the concrete functioning of the situation between two people, have been derived original conceptualizations which later have entered, in different measures, into the cultured lexicon in general, and which draw legitimacy from their having been born in and inserted into the psychoanalytic laboratory. To take one single example: the process of identification with the other in Freud already has a tone and a resonance different from those that it can take in psychiatry and psychology. Projective identification, described later by Melanie Klein, came from the expansion of specifically psychoanalytic experience and is intimately linked to it.
There is thus a psychoanalytic specificity closely linked to the inauguration of a determinate “experimental” frame. On this there is little disagreement. But disagreement arises as soon as we pass from the plane of repeatable, individual-typical experience to an attempt at general comprehension or explanation of experience itself, of its presuppositions and implications—when, that is, we pose the problem of the model or the models which organize experience itself. Freud started off from a scientific horizon in which mechanicism and research on “forces” of a physicochemical order largely predominated in explaining all kinds of reality. In theorizing his own procedure, he had largely taken advantage of these preconditions, and not in a solely metaphorical fashion. The so-called economic and energetic side of his construction—an aspect based on the hypothesis of a “quantity” of excitation which can be variably displaced within the psychic apparatus—is a direct confirmation of this foundation. But what strikes one in Freud is, rather, the simultaneous presence of different models (energetic, dynamic-conflictual, topical), however heterogeneous to each other, which are positioned to give an account of the complex unity of analytic experience, avoiding the attempt to discard important elements that are irreducible to one or other of these models.
It was inevitable, however, that in the course of its diffusion the psychoanalytic discovery—insofar as it is centered on the relationship of man with himself, of consciousness with itself, and with the other of itself—encountered doctrines and disciplines that have always traditionally dealt with these problems. One can reasonably assert that this encounter—a collision and, also, a collusion—was perhaps the most significant element in the history of psychoanalysis in the last decades, and a not insignificant part of the history of Western culture.
To enter in a detailed fashion into this especially complex issue is impossible here. But one can identify the lines of a trend that, especially in the first half of the century, explicitly or implicitly underlies a large part of the “cultural” attempts at comprehending psychoanalysis and explaining it to itself, inserting it at the same time into the already understood. This trend consists of the attempt to reorient psychoanalysis to something external to it; at the extreme limit, it is translated into a systematic application of the reductive “nothing other than . . .” principle (“psychoanalysis is nothing other than . . .”), through which psychoanalysis is returned to the ambit of general psychology, of religion, of literature, of philosophy, of ethics, and so on, in even the most subtle and sophisticated of ways, and often at the hands of psychoanalysts themselves (Carl Gustav Jung, for example, can be considered the first great transcriber of the Freudian discovery in terms of a mythologizing spiritualism).
Next to these attempts, tendencies exist that are oriented toward “purifying” barbaric psychoanalysis, supplying it with patents of correct and generally acceptable scientificness, mostly modeled on the current state of the sciences (and thus, the substitution of models of a cognitivist, cybernetic, mathematical, or other type, for those “antiquated” ones used by Freud).
In recent years this kind of “capturing” of psychoanalysis has been declining, while the attempt to formalize psychoanalysis from the inside has been stronger, in an attempt to find the axis of its specific scientificness in its own mode of proceeding. Jacques Lacan’s research on language is moving in this direction; beyond the lapidary formulae and his at once esoteric and exoteric performance, it represents one of the most interesting moments of this excavatory work within the analytic situation itself. This work is also being conducted in other directions, all based on the characteristics specific to the analytic relation, on the subversion of the spatiotemporal categories manifested in it, and so on.
These attempts at internal formalization have succeeded at least in part in overturning the already-mentioned tendency to assimilate psychoanalysis into traditional disciplines, giving way to an opposite course, that is to say, to an (imperialist? . . .) occupation of independent disciplines by psychoanalysis or by concepts derived from it.
We might admit that, continuing to work on its own terrain, psychoanalysis will succeed in elaborating its own autonomous scientific status, detaching itself from the innumerable interpretations which have saturated it in the course of the century. We might, however, also admit that, simultaneously, it will progressively reveal its own limit, which up to now has remained concealed by the overabundance of cultural constructions which took it as an object, in both positive and negative senses. It is an anthropological limit that will, in short, be discovered in the moment when, as we presume will happen, the current saturation of the cultural world by psychoanalysis will recede and it will appear to us more clearly defined as a historical-cultural “form.” Let us try briefly to clarify this point.
The entire Freudian world, we have seen, is created through the incessant contact with human situations characterized by an inhibition, a block, a loss of vitality. Freud was well aware of this, so much so that he began to speak of minderwertig situations, which is to say, situations of lower quality, poor. Now, also characteristic of Freud is what we could call a movement of nostalgia for the world of human abundance, marked for him initially by the presence of art. From the point of view of his daily work and of the theory accompanying it, however, this world proves difficult to reach, if not unreachable. The theoretical difficulty presented by his concept of sublimation proves this directly. In his work on Leonardo da Vinci, Freud is relentless in the search for the passages, moments of resolution, and sudden turns which led the man from an orphaned childhood to the grandeur of the adult artist.
After Freud, in the triumphal success of psychoanalysis, the sense of blocked, impoverished situations, in which Freud and other psychoanalysts intervened, has progressively been lost. The hysteric, the Wolf Man, and Judge Schreber have become heroes of a cultural turn which has erased the traces of their own real difficulties. They have become true and proper heroes—not, as one sometimes hears, protagonists of psychoanalytic tales or novels, but genuine prototypical figures, in the same sense in which one can speak of Leonardo as having been among the greatest representatives of the myth of the artist. Emblematic figures of the splitting of the classical Subject—so they appear in Freud’s description—have later acquired in culture a paradoxical, phantasmatic fullness.
How could this happen—how could an entire culture identify itself, through Freud’s work, with these figures? We must suppose that something characteristic of Freud acts upon or acted within this culture, that is, the conception of a basic continuity of the psychic, which ignores the discontinuous and the radically different, differences between levels, and the leap or rupture which these imply. In Freud, this situation is explicitly confessed in the problematic and, in fact, nostalgic approach to the full, mythologized figures of the Renaissance. In the culture following in his wake, this nostalgia was lost, overwhelmed by the interest that his method aroused. The Freudian problem of (1) “how one can become” an artist à la Leonardo or a writer à la Dostoyevsky, surpassing the limits of the unconscious, has been lost and even in some cases, at least according to the common approach, has become the simple premise of (2) “how one is” an artist or writer from the outset, without posing the problem of the creative spark or leap which brings one to the work. In this sense, in his hesitations, Freud anticipates an epoch in which aesthetic experience disappears as a distinct, unified experience, and only comes to light or flashes up here and there, in contexts otherwise very different.
What is true of aesthetic experience could be repeated on other levels of the human, at first on an immediately contiguous level to the aesthetic one, which we could call the ecstatic level. This level is certainly, in our culture, at the boundaries of the taboo and the unsayable.
Today we detect signs of change precisely in these directions: the untouchable or the unsayable begins perhaps to make itself, little by little, practiced and practicable. It is at this point, we believe, that the anthropological and historical limit of Freudian psychoanalysis will become increasingly clear.